Salvage logging has been advocated as a means of speeding up the recovery of mountain birch stands that have been damaged by moth outbreaks, but empirical tests of the effects of logging have been missing. In a new paper in Forest Ecology and Management, we show that logging stimulates the growth and production of basal sprouts in the short term, but that these positive effects can be counteracted by ungulate browsing on the sprouts.

Our study localities are located in Troms and Finnmark counties in Northern Norway, approx. 69-70°N, 18-30 °E. Most of our sites experience an oceanic climate with mild and snow-rich winters and cool summers. Tromsø (69°40’N, 19° E) has a mean temperatures of -4.4°C in January and 9.1°C in July and an annual precipitation of just above 1000 mm.